Her pit bull pets kill Middleburg woman

SCENE She was found in her back yard with the pair standing over her. 911 CALL Frantic son heard yelling at dogs as he attempts to approach his mother.

Dana Treen

MIDDLEBURG - Authorities and family members are looking for answers about why a pair of pit bull terriers with no history of violence suddenly turned on their owner Tuesday, killing her and keeping others from being able to help her.

It was about 8 a.m. Tuesday when Tina Marie Canterbury, 42, was found lying in the back yard of her rural Middleburg neighborhood with the 2-year-old pit bull terriers Rebel and Thor standing over her.

The dogs could be heard barking viciously at the woman's son as he talked with emergency dispatchers and tried to check her pulse.

Canterbury had been bitten in the face and upper body and was dead by the time deputies arrived.

Her son, Christopher "Cody" Canterbury, 21, was bitten in the neck as he tried to reach her but did not suffer serious injuries.

In the 911 call, he can be heard trying frantically to reach his mother while yelling at the dogs to get back.

"She's got a cut on her eye and her shirt's all bloody," he tells the dispatcher before trying to see if his mother has a pulse or is breathing.

As he moves closer, he begins screaming at the dogs to move and get away before saying he feels a pulse but can't detect breathing. As he yells louder and louder at the dogs to move, the phone goes dead.

In a second call, a man who identifies himself as Joe said his brother had been attacked by the dogs as he tried to check their mother's pulse.

"They are in the back yard," he said. "They are over my mom and they won't let us get near."

When deputies pull up, he yells: "Hey, if they come at you, shoot 'em."

According to a Sheriff's Office report, one of those at the house, Joseph Harrell, 21, had already shot at the dogs to scare them off.

In addition to Harrell and Christopher Canterbury, a third person, Danielle Reavis, 18, was at the house. Canterbury's husband was out of town working and was expected to return later in the afternoon from New York, said Billy Canterbury, a family cousin and pastor of their church.

He said Tina Canterbury and his cousin had been high school sweethearts.

"She's a beautiful young lady," he said. "It's a tragedy and the world is a lesser place for this young lady not being there."

Billy Canterbury said the dogs were like kids.

"They lived in the house with them. They would lay up on the couch with them," he said.

Clay County's director of animal control, Connie Goon, said in her 18 years in the post there have been just two such fatalities and in each case, a pit bull terrier killed its owner.

Authorities said there were no signs that the dogs were abused or had been used for fighting. No dogfighting implements or training devices were found at the home, and the dogs did not have marks that they had been fighters.

There is no record of any police calls relating to the dogs or other incidents at the residence on Cosmos Avenue off County Road 218, according to Sheriff's Office records.

Beseler said that before authorities arrived, one of the dogs had already been shot and the second had run off. One of the first deputies to arrive killed one of the dogs when it lunged toward him. The second dog was found running along a property line and killed about two hours later.

The sheriff said the dogs that killed Tina Canterbury had been family pets since they were pups.

Even though, Beseler said, the case "brings to light the danger of these type of dogs."

Neighbor Stacie Cox, 25, said she has lived across Cosmos Avenue off and on for about two years and that other dogs in the neighborhood were prone to get out but the Canterburys' did not.

"From what I've seen, they were really well-behaved dogs," she said.

Gayward Hendry, an administrative assistant to Beseler who has had law enforcement experience investigating dog fighting rings for the State Attorney's Office and the Jacksonville Sheriff's Office, said dogs that attack their owners usually have backgrounds that would prompt that kind of violence.